to find those files, i did C drive searches of the exact filenames. they were the only results.

here's what i think happened: i had winamp open (and probably actively playing something) a week or two ago, and something knocked my laptop, which rebooted it. its a great laptop, but it has a freefall sensor which is WAY too sensitive (i posted about that a few months ago). slight knocks cause hard reboots, and i can't do squat about it.

anyway, i launched winamp, and for the first time ever (that i can remember anyway) i got the "blank ML" screen, and it had the explanatory msg you put there with the button to click to delete and make new ML DB files. i did that and it worked, and i rescanned in the files to ML and np. but i never checked the history view. i think i have manually cleared and rescanned in the ML since then too.

so, if the laptop died or rebooted while playing, i think it could have killed both DB entities, (ie. history and ML). does that sound reasonable to you?

perhaps the history view now needs a similar "jic" button like the ML has when corrupted?

that sounds reasonable with what has been assumed to be the likely cause of an incomplete write / update of the files which if the OS is trying to shut things down but there's the potential for Winamp to not enough time to do things (or it even gets halted part-way before Winamp is properly killed). unless the reboot was a an instant power-off event and then it's still likely but is harder to explain as there shouldn't have been a chance for Winamp to even attempt to start writing things out.

really a backup of the files is needed when a write / update happens (which is a better option and could be applied for _all_ database files) and / or like you mention a jic button like the library now has.

there is no OS shutting down... the freefall sensor essentially turns off the computer instantly, immediate power cycle, (when it "senses" the need, which in my case is way too much). maybe winamp was writing the history at that moment, idk.

i was going to mention the backup thing, meaning building that smart redundancy into winamp, but i didn't want to annoy you.

it wouldn't be annoying me, is just a complete lack of time to get around to implementing it (and all of the other things that we've all agreed on should be done but just haven't). and with that now the gf is back home from work, i'm going to have some sort of break from work (as i've already done 10:30 to 16:30 today).